What camera was it that made you fall in love with photography? Was it a little crappy point and shoot that you still took great photos with? Was it an old film SLR? The magic of polaroid as a kid? Or the DSLR you bought the other day?

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I loved that camera - much smaller than today's monsters. Fully mechanical - the battery was only required for the light meter. The viewfinder was a real thing of beauty - much more light comes through than the viewfinder of any DSLR I've used. The feel of it in the hand, the lovely clunk of the shutter ... I'll stop now. Suffice to say I loved using it, and still feel the occasional pang of guilt when I think about it gathering dust on a shelf.

I can't say it was really a camera that tickled my fancy originally. I spent a good year researching digital SLR cameras, DSLR camera functionality, and photographic theory before I ever purchased a camera. I think it was more the theory that attracted me at first than anything else.

Today, now that I've been working on my photography with my Canon 450D for about 15 months, its become more about the art than anything else. And now, the camera that I really want to get my hands on is the Canon 5D Mark II (or Mark III, if it comes out soon enough.)

Same! Although you've both spent more time with one and more time before one. I'd always wanted to do photography but only recently got a chance to use a decent camera, as well as time to sit down and learn the mechanics of everything. A week with my 50D and I'm loving it! I just wish I had money to get past this crappy kit lens :P
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Nick BedfordAug 24 '10 at 23:52

I worked in a camera shop from the age of 15 and always loved the manual cameras (Pentax K1000 was my first and I too had an Olympus OM-1 that I loved) but it was one of these I always lusted after, and when one came in second hand I snapped it up. Wish I'd kept it and had the money to build a system around it and pay for the processing to really find out what it was capable of.

A real pocket beauty that handled standard 35mm film. Reputedly a smallest 35mm camera ever mass produced. It had no manual controls but one could fake aperture correction by changing film ISO speed setting (which was not autodetected from the film case).

I took thousands of photos with this camera, all on dia film, and I only stopped when it fell into water and died :(

I also had an original Minox flash for 35 GT which was also a small pocket wonder.

My first camera, and it was a digital camera that can fit in my pocket. I took hundreds of thousands of photos throughout high school with this camera. I moved on to bigger and better cameras since then, but nothing bit me harder with the photography bug than this camera.

Not one camera got me to fancy photography; I got excited from a crappy Logitech webcam, then a D2H that I managed to lay my hands on for a period, and afterwards I enjoyed running around taking snaps with a slow, zoomless, cheap, horrible Sony P&S.

If you love photography you'd love the tool of the trade too, but the machine in itself probably won't be the only thing that will get you to catch the bug.

I shot hundreds and hundreds of photos with this, I'd had digital cameras before but they needed to be remembered, and charged and stocked, this was always with me and always ready quickly. Moved swiftly onto a much better camera, then stopped for a couple of years, then moved back into the DSLR game.

Wonderfully ergonomic: Fitted my hand like a glove --- I was never afraid about dropping it, so had the courage to stick my hand out all kinds of places, off the edges of boats, buildings, right down next to water... That kind of confidence leads to great pictures!

The introductory DSLR; it was really the one that kicked the whole business off, 'nuf said: reasonable price, decent resolution, and it worked with every nikon lens from the last 20 years.

A blue and black plastic camera, almost a toy but a functional film camera, ordered with help from my parents and boxtops clipped off some some breakfast cereal. This was in the 1960s, when I was maybe 6 or 7, maybe older. No idea make or model, but if I had to bet a dollar, something Kodak designed to get kids interested in taking pictures (and pestering parents to buy film). Well, it worked!

Attempting a semi-generic answer (which won't match everyone's experience, to be sure, but hopefully will be more generic than some, allowing for less duplication of concepts -- if someone wants to turn this answer into a community wiki, please feel free):

The camera that made me fall in love with photography was the all-mechanical SLR (except for the electronic light meter, which you could use the camera without having batteries for) that my parents let me use. In my particular case, it was a Nikon FM, but I think the same story could apply with any number of cameras (e.g. another poster's Olympus OM-1). The things that made the difference for me were:

It had a macro lens. Being able to take a photo of something and have it appear life-size (actually slightly bigger) on the film was a wonder to me. From pennies to human eyes to rainbows from a crystal window hanging, falling across the patterns of denim, this somehow got me excited about things (I'd later get into much more interesting macro subject matter than some of those).

All mechanical. There's a certain sound about things, as the other poster talks about, but also it allows for one to explore the workings -- to open up the camera and see what happens as you slowly re-cock the shutter, for example, or to find the little lever that interfaces between the camera and lens to cause the aperture to close when you fire the shutter or hold the DOF-preview button. Not to mention the fact that it just sort of Always Works -- worst case, you stop having a light meter.

It had interchangeable lenses. In my case, besides the 55mm/2.8 macro, there was also a 70-200 zoom lens. I've always liked telephoto, somehow, so having this was cool. And having the old-school style where the outer barrel moved, and had the flaring DOF-guide, was just somehow satisfying. (If anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about, look at the lens in this video-explanation of DOF; he describes them about 1:45 in.)

It was an SLR -- I was actually looking through the lens that the picture would be taken through. This was magical to me, somehow -- and certainly an improvement over the alternative for doing things like macro.

It was what my mom was using -- and always nice, as a kid, to emulate mom and dad, right? :)

I could do long exposures with it. I think I'd used the camera before I really discovered the wonders of this, but BULB mode with a locking cable-release allowed me to take pictures that were unlike the world I saw with my naked eye, which was really neat to me.

Beyond just long exposures, it also just let me have control of exposure, and in particular exposure time. When I learned that to get a good photo of a TV (classic CRT, of course, and NTSC in my case), you wanted a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second. If you used a faster shutter speed, only part of the frame would be lit up. Wow. Only part of the frame is lit up at one time?? And that's not just something that someone has told to me in the abstract, but it's something I can actually take a photo to prove? That sure got me excited. And then I turned it around, and for a cell-animation of Snoopy, I ended up with a nice still image of the dog house, with four dancing snoopy poses ghosted on top of each other. How cool is that?

The optical split-screen focusing screen, with a ring around that of (not that I knew the name at the time) micro-prism indication... having a way to really know when things were in focus: very handy. But also fascinating -- "hey, weird -- if I move my eye around, half this inner circle goes dark. What's going on? That's weird, but cool!"

I'm sure there were other things, too, that I'm forgetting to mention.

The bottom line, for me, is that this was the camera that got me excited about photography. As other answers have said, getting into the darkroom later was a very important step, as well. But really, I was already hooked, thanks to this camera.

I'm even lucky enough to have had my mom give it to me, years later, when she got a DSLR. As with other posters, I feel guilty at times for leaving it on a shelf. But then, sometimes, I take it off the shelf, and shoot with it. And it's still a joy to me to do so. :)

Hopefully others can relate to a similar experience -- again, feel free to make this a community wiki and add your own bullet points, or just add them in the comments.

Olympus C-2020, which we got in 2001, I think. It's basically compact by today's standards, but had full manual control, with apertures ranging from f/2.0 to f/11, ISO up to 400 and whooping 2.1 megapixels.

A Nikon EM, sort of a point-and-shoot beginner's SLR, that I got in high school (way back when ... mid 80s?). It was hard to control because the meter always set the shutter speed, but it was a 35mm camera so you could develop your own B&W film and make your own prints. And that started my love of the craft of photography.